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Hello everybody,
This week we’re looking at progress with John Gray. If you want to see John and me at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival, we will both be there next weekend in London. Use “MINIPHIL20” as a discount code if you are free and want to come. Do say hello if you’re there.
I’ve talked about Dave before.
Dave was an old colleague of mine back in my teaching days — with slicked-back Elvis hair and an undiluted Cockney accent. Dave was a kind of mentor who knew his way around the place. He was also a willfully technophobic Luddite who’d ask me why his unplugged computer wasn’t working. We paid each other in kind, like a symbiotic bird-rhino relationship.
One day, we were resentfully carted from our peaceful savannah to sit in a cramped hall for the spring term’s training day.
“New Approaches to Learning: The Whole Child Theory.”
“Thanks, everyone,” the facilitator said after an hour-long presentation. “We’re going to now go into breakout groups.”
As luck would have it, Dave and I were placed together at the same table. Bird and rhino reunited to glue together cut-out cards all about The Whole Child™ — an exercise that was somehow infantilizing, infuriating, and impossible all at once.
Then came the reflection period.
“So, what do you think about the theory, Jonny?” the facilitator said.
“Well, yeah, I think it makes sense. I’ll have to change a few resources, but it seems like it’ll be some decent effort that’ll pay off later.”
Suitably agreeable. Suitably vapid. A box gets ticked, and we can all move on.
“What about you, Dave?”
“Sorry, mate?”
“What do you think about Zhang’s approach to The Whole Child?”
“Zhang, eh?” Dave said. “Isn’t this exactly the same thing that they were saying in the ‘90s? When I first started, this is what we were doing. Of course, we didn’t call it this back then. JT, you’ll back me up, do you remember that bloke who…”
As became clear over a ten-minute monologue, Dave had seen the pendulum swing. Dave’s theory was that in most learning and development environments, a fad will always, given enough time, come swinging back around. It’ll have a new name, a new representative, and probably millions in venture backing, but it’ll all seem like old hat to someone like Dave.
And so, this week we’re going to look at the swing of the pendulum and ask: Is there such a thing as progress?
Go well,
Jonny
Seeing history with Gray-tinted glasses
There are two different kinds of stories.
The first is the linear story. The characters start at position A and end at position B, having beaten all the baddies and married the right person. The real story is about the transformation that happens along the way. This is a story about direction. Mostly, it’s about progress. We move from naïve to wise, raw to cooked, NPC to hero.
In terms of philosophy, the linear-progressive story is best represented by the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel argued that history is measured by a series of resolvable battles. One side represents red, the other represents blue. The two struggle over days, years, decades, or centuries until eventually they bleed so much they bleed into each other. Red and blue become purple. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Movement, countermovement, resolution. And so, for Hegel, we move forward in a constantly improving run. Each battle makes us better and wiser.
Over the summer, I spoke with the philosopher John Gray about this idea of “progress,” and Gray doesn’t think much of it.
“If you go back to Greek drama or Shakespeare, or Hinduism or Buddhism, none of these assumptions are made about the future of mankind being potentially better than it’s ever been in the past. It’s a modern Western myth, and I would say it’s a kind of neo-Christian myth, because it comes about by secularizing certain Christian assumptions about sacred time, about human history being meaningful.”
I encourage you to watch the full video because Gray has that kind of easy, enviable erudition where he can just drop in an obscure quote or historical anecdote to color his argument. But, as far as I can tell, this is what Gray argues in a good ol’-fashioned premises-to-conclusion form:
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Progress is not the same as improvement. Progress means a cumulative advance that does not unwind over generations or centuries.
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In technology, we do make progress. The gains are cumulative and retained over millennia.
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In ethics and politics, though, gains are not cumulative — they unwind depressingly often.
Therefore: There is no such thing as progress in ethics and politics.
It’s a persuasive argument, and much does depend on Gray’s definition of progress as something that’s basically permanent. If we accept that, well, then it doesn’t take a macrohistorian to point out that almost all civilizations do tend to unwind over time. We oscillate between periods of peace and war; order and madness; security and terror. Politically, history is a pendulum. So, too, ethically. For all our talk of human rights, liberty, and universal love, we still kill and destroy each other with Neolithic ease. And here we have the second kind of story: the cyclical one. The pendulum one. This story sees history as oscillation, and we just happen to occupy a certain position on the swing.
But what about those Hegelian ideas of progress? For example, what about Karl Marx’s idea that our systems of governance are moving forward? Marx argued that we can see a movement from something like despotism to feudalism to capitalism to socialism. Each was different from the one before, each a step better, and there was no “unwinding,” as Gray put it.
But Gray doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t think there will be any “end of history” in either the Francis Fukuyama or Marxist sense. Rather, Gray sees things in terms of revolutions and countermovements. In politics and ethics, nothing stays still long enough to be called progress.
On that, I think I agree with Gray. On an individual level, I believe most people are only one or two catastrophes away from utter moral ruin. If you murdered my children, threw me into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and gave me a gun, I have little doubt I’d become unrecognizable to who I am right now. We are all just a comic strip away from our villain origin story.
On a social level, I think the same is true. If you just look at how wildly irrational the crowd becomes in times of shortage or fear, I think you can appreciate how much things rest on a knife-edge. In the UK, it only took a few headlines of “there might be a supply problem with toilet roll” for the entire country to panic-buy the stuff. People get weird when things get bad. The next great revolution might come in one bomb, one virus, or one intergalactic threat. Or it might be the drip effect of constant deterioration and deprivation. Either way, I see the world with Gray-tinted glasses.
So, what do you think? Are we progressing socially, politically, and ethically? Or do you think we just happen to be riding one swing of a colossal pendulum of the gods?
IN A QUOTE
Jonny is the creator of the Mini Philosophy social network. He’s an internationally bestselling author of three books and the resident philosopher at Big Think. He’s known all over the world for making philosophy accessible, relatable, and fun.
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